​The Weather Station stays loyal to folk tradition

“Folk” has always been a nebulously defined genre descriptor, its quaint tag encompassing everything from Lomax-era plantation blues to the beatnik strumming of Greenwich Village, and its meaning has been muddied further as an umbrella to ignorantly lump together regional, or “world,” music. In the 21st century, the sounds of the South have apparently all been collected and protest songs are more likely to feature a big-name rapper than a harmonica.

Our conceptions of folk music in 2015 are neatly consolidated into two camps: foot-stomping arena folk a la Mumford & Sons and Everything Else. Somewhere along the line, the banjo reared its headstock to bask in a newfound novelty, and overly-earnest songwriters – lookin’ at you here, Lumineers – climbed Billboard peaks that folk musicians hadn’t summited since the first Woodstock gathering. All the while, folk’s Old Guard and traditionalist torchbearers have toiled on, doing their best to ignore the still-inflating folk-pop bubble.

In response to the perverse bombast of Top 40 folk, a burgeoning collection of folk singers has opted to dial down the volume to pin-drop levels, letting their songs and stories breathe with plenty of headroom to spare.

At the forefront of this soft-tongued pack is Tamara Lindeman, a Canadian songstress recording under the meteorological moniker The Weather Station. With sparse production and instrumentation from fellow Canucks Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas) and Robbie Lackritz (Feist), Lindeman’s third full-length, “Loyalty,” is a sublime song cycle with lyrical baggage far heavier than her avian voice lets on.

Tumbling gently out of the gate with the exceptional “Way It Is, Way It Could Be,” the trio trods longingly through Lindeman’s wintry imagery, distinctively Northern in its cloistered desperation. Devoid of flash, her nimble voice mesmerizes nonetheless, sure to draw comparisons to her contemporary Laura Marling and the currently endangered progenitor Joni Mitchell. The album’s arrangements are light-handed, often propelled by little more than Lindeman’s cascading fingerpicking and unobtrusive percussion accents, which leaves plenty of canvas for Lindeman’s evocative lyrics to hang and dissipate.

Her writing is vividly autumnal, and the vignettes painted by each song make for a gorgeous, sad-eyed travelogue. On the skeletal “Personal Eclipse,” she elicits a cold foreignness, intoning “I walked on the streets of California in the wail of car alarms/Men would shout to me passing, a stranger with crossed arms.” Elsewhere, she wrings powerless sympathy out of “I Could Only Stand By,” cooing “All through the winter I could only stand by/Watching you wake to the hardest kind of trouble with no guiding light.” Kerouacian in tone, Lindeman’s lyrics seem to sidle up closer to “Big Sur” malaise than “On the Road” enlightenment.

Lindeman’s “Loyalty” makes a fair case for the “third-time’s-the-charm” maxim, resting on the understated strength of her image-laden lyrics and the mercurial voice that carries them. If the album is to be looked at as any sort of signifier within the realm of folk music, it may be that the chart-dominating folk-pop of today will end not with a bang, but with a whisper.

Notable tracks: “Way It Is, Way It Could Be,” “Tapes,” “Life’s Work”

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